E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession -- Rolling Stone mag

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession -- Rolling Stone mag

Postby Nordic » Sat Apr 07, 2007 2:55 am

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... ard_hunt/1

It's an awesome read. Yes, one of the "three tramps" at the Kennedy assassination, and the leader of the Watergate burglary. This guy was the ultimate CIA bad guy.

E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under "LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll."

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.
Nordic
 
Posts: 14230
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2006 3:36 am
Location: California USA
Blog: View Blog (6)

Postby marykmusic » Sat Apr 07, 2007 10:15 am

I'm most of the way done with reading this, and is it interesting! Thanks. I don't read R.S. much any more (too much drivel about pop music) but historically, some of the greatest news stories have come out of it. --MaryK
http://www.zforcegroup.com

"You cannot wifstand my supewiew intewect." --Tweety Bird
marykmusic
 
Posts: 1502
Joined: Fri May 20, 2005 12:23 am
Location: Central Arizona
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Apr 07, 2007 10:24 pm

amazingly good article, thanks
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby jingofever » Sun Apr 08, 2007 12:34 am

I didn't finish the article yet (I will next time I'm on the can) but what I found funny was the profile of St. John Hunt as a broke, out of work, former meth addict and felon. And I'm thinking, could there be any ulterior motives for his coming out with this information? I'm not suggesting he is trying to get money, just saying it is an easy way to brush him off.
User avatar
jingofever
 
Posts: 2814
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 6:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby Nordic » Sun Apr 08, 2007 1:25 am

Yes, I thought of that, too.

However, the article makes it clear that there is an audio tape of the same information, given in E.H.H.'s voice.

So unless he faked the audiotape it seems unlikely.

Yeah, it's a trip that this guys' kids are all messed up. Makes sense, of course, but it just adds to the whole portrait of an utterly amoral human being.

As far as Rolling Stone, they have indeed had some of the best journalism about the Bush administration crimes in the past five years. The one called, I believe, "The Man Who Sold the War" is a must-read as well. That article, as well as this one, should be taught in every eighth-grade social studies class.
Nordic
 
Posts: 14230
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2006 3:36 am
Location: California USA
Blog: View Blog (6)

Postby streeb » Sun Apr 08, 2007 8:11 am

I think it's bullshit. Interesting that he doesn't include David Atlee Phillips in the plot. LBJ? Sure. Whatever.

This is a partial admission of something resembling truth, with an all important clause exonerating Hunt. It'll satisfy a portion of the assasination nerds, but I don't buy it. And to use his son as the messenger? Assuming that any of this actually transpired between Hunt and St. John, and further assuming that Hunt is feeding him lies, then it's a hugely shitty thing to do. But not worse than anybody reading this blog would expect from the man.
User avatar
streeb
 
Posts: 1061
Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2006 9:19 pm
Location: Zona, BC
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby sunny » Sun Apr 08, 2007 8:23 am

"hugely shitty" is the mildest thing one could say about Hunt.

Nobody was safe from the bastard, not his wife, children, the president, or the country.

The man was in Dealey Plaza. A jury has spoken on the matter. If he didn't shoot the President himself, he was surely participating in, if not actually directing, the op.
Choose love
sunny
 
Posts: 5220
Joined: Mon May 16, 2005 10:18 pm
Location: Alabama
Blog: View Blog (1)

Postby streeb » Sun Apr 08, 2007 1:37 pm

It's a very good piece, nonetheless. It's colourful and it gives a sense of what a hot dog he was. But Hunt spent decades protesting his innocence, and here he is still trying to wriggle out of any responsibility, with his last breath. That's the real story here, I think. I'm looking forward to what Lisa Pease has to say about it. She promised she would comment on her Real History blog, but hasn't yet.
User avatar
streeb
 
Posts: 1061
Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2006 9:19 pm
Location: Zona, BC
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re:

Postby MinM » Thu Oct 20, 2011 10:34 pm

streeb wrote:I think it's bullshit. Interesting that he doesn't include David Atlee Phillips in the plot. LBJ? Sure. Whatever.

This is a partial admission of something resembling truth, with an all important clause exonerating Hunt. It'll satisfy a portion of the assasination nerds, but I don't buy it. And to use his son as the messenger? Assuming that any of this actually transpired between Hunt and St. John, and further assuming that Hunt is feeding him lies, then it's a hugely shitty thing to do. But not worse than anybody reading this blog would expect from the man.

David Atlee Phillips is featured prominently in the video series which includes the capture and execution of Patrice Lumumba:

It reminds me a little of the old newsreels of Lumumba's capture:

(a couple minutes into this clip)


http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... 17#p431017



The more things change...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=17468
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession -- Rolling Stone mag

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Fri Oct 21, 2011 3:21 pm

Hunt behaved himself after his co-workers took out his wife in the Watergate Plane Crash of December, 1972.

His 'confessions' are misdirection, probably to protect his kids.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
User avatar
Hugh Manatee Wins
 
Posts: 9869
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:51 pm
Location: in context
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession -- Rolling Stone mag

Postby wordspeak2 » Sat Oct 22, 2011 2:49 pm

Hey, the link's not working for me. What's up with that?
wordspeak2
 
Posts: 1209
Joined: Mon Nov 13, 2006 5:20 pm
Location: Massachusetts
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession -- Rolling Stone mag

Postby barracuda » Sat Oct 22, 2011 2:55 pm

It's an antique link - try this one.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
User avatar
barracuda
 
Posts: 12890
Joined: Thu Sep 06, 2007 5:58 pm
Location: Niles, California
Blog: View Blog (0)

The CIA, Cuba and Operation Peter Pan

Postby MinM » Fri Dec 16, 2011 5:06 pm


This story features prominently the aforementioned David Atlee Phillips and Antonio Veciana.
Weekend Edition December 16-18, 2011

Where's Captain Hook in NPR's Fairy Tale?

The CIA, Cuba and Operation Peter Pan

by SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES

“Los niños nacen para ser felices.”

– José Martí

On November 19, 2011 NPR broadcast “Children Of Cuba Remember: Their Flight To America.” Reporter Greg Allen claimed the 1960-62 journey from Cuba to the United States of 14,000 plus Cuban children “was made possible because of a deal a priest in the Miami diocese [Father Bryan Walsh] … worked out with the US State Department. The agreement allowed him to sign visa waivers for children 16 or under.” Allen then interviewed several right-of-center Cuban Americans to offer “objective” perspective on the facts surrounding Operation Peter Pan.

Curiously, Allen omitted the CIA from his report, although ample evidence shows the Agency in the early 1960s conspired with the Church to spirit kids out of Cuba.

Once inside the nurturing borders of the greatest country in the world “Pedro Pan kids have done well,” Allen concluded, without explaining what “well” means. Now adult Pedro Pan kids remain “firmly opposed to any normalization of relations with the Castro regime, the regime that was responsible for breaking up their families and forcing them from their homeland.”

NPR staff might have discovered a more complex and sinister story – had they looked. The CIA refuses to release Peter Pan documents, but abundant testimony shows the Agency forging documents and spreading lies, with Father Walsh and the regional Catholic hierarchy. Their goal: separate elite children from parents (a Cuban brain drain) and generate political instability.

One Operation Peter Pan conspirator, Antonio Veciana, now living in Miami, told us how Maurice Bishop (aka CIA official David Atlee Phillips) recruited him in 1960 “to wage psychological war — to destabilize the government.” Veciana described how the Agency forged a law to make affluent Cubans believe the revolutionary government planned to usurp parental control. Bishop’s agents in Cuba spread this rumor, backed by a forged simulation of the supposed law, to members of the professional and propertied classes. The forgery “declared that parents would lose control of their kids to the state.”

Veciana recounted how “CIA agents claimed they’d stolen the document from the Cuban government.” This false document “created tremendous panic.” On October 26, 1960, CIA-controlled Swan island radio station, south of Cuba, broadcast breaking “news.” Cuba’s government, the radio asserted, planned to remove children from parents so as to indoctrinate them. Radio Swan reported another lie: the Cuban underground had obtained a copy of the forthcoming “law.”

Minimal research would have revealed that Leopoldina and Ramón Grau Alsina, niece and nephew of former Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martín, had confessed to Cuban security officials after being arrested in 1965 to having printed the false law in Havana, circulated it clandestinely and then lied to parents.

Article 3 of the apocryphal document stated: “When this law comes into effect, the custody of persons under 20 years of age will be exercised by the state via persons or organizations to which this power has been delegated.” Priests and CIA agents both recruited kids and persuaded parents to “trust us. The US government will care for them.”

The clergy circulated the phony document among their Cuban upper middle-class flock. Catholic school officials feared Castro’s rapidly expanding public instruction program would undermine their virtual educational monopoly among moneyed sectors.

In March 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow the Cuban government. Agency plotters designed Peter Pan to run alongside political propaganda and economic strangulation policies. These parallel tracks would weaken Castro’s government while US trainers prepared a Cuban-exile invasion force, which, in turn, would coordinate with CIA-backed urban terrorists and guerrillas.

Operation Peter Pan (recall the Disney film?) used Cuban kids and parents to further their goal: overthrowing the revolutionary government. NPR’s claim of “no evidence” of CIA involvement would have dissolved had they asked Veciana or questioned why the CIA still refuses to release its 1500 plus documents on that Operation — while de-classifying archives on the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 Missile Crisis? ...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/ ... peter-pan/
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession -- Rolling Stone mag

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Dec 17, 2011 2:48 am

NPR staff might have discovered a more complex and sinister story – had they looked. The CIA refuses to release...


Um, NPR staff IS the CIA, people. That's why the whitewashed distorted presentation of what CIA did back then to steal children from Cuba.

Also, leading up to and concurrent with this CIA-NPR treatment of the kidnapping by CIA were subliminal references to
the movie, 'The Sound of Music.' The story before NPR's 'Pedro Pan' story included singing and other sources (BBC News and Oprah Magazine) have put the headline 'Favorite Things' on their front pages to evoke the escape by children from Hitler's Austria while Julie Andrews croons.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11651490
29 October 2010 Last updated at 06:52 ET
The Sound of Music cast reunite on Oprah Winfrey show
The cast of The Sound of Music have reunited for the first time in 45 years on Oprah Winfrey's US chat show.

Dame Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer - Maria and Captain Von Trapp in the classic musical film - were joined by the actors who played his seven on-screen children.

The story of a singing Austrian family trying to escape the Nazis prior to World War II won five Oscars in 1966.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-160310545
December 2011 Last updated at 06:48 ET
Christopher Plummer slates 'gooey' Sound of Music role

Sound of Music cast reunite on TV
Christopher Plummer has cited his role in classic musical The Sound of Music as the "toughest" he has ever played.


Elvis Costello sang 'This is Hell' and included 'My Favorite Things,' the 'Sound of Music' version.

http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/elvis ... _hell.html

This is hell, this is hell, this is hell.
"My Favourite Things" are playing
Again and again
But it's by Julie Andrews
And not by John Coltrane

Endless balmy breezes and perfect sunsets framed
Vintage wine for breakfast
And naked starlets floating in Champagne
All the passions of your youth
Are tranquillised and tamed
You may think it looks familiar
Though you may know it by another name
[Chorus]
This is hell, this is hell.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
User avatar
Hugh Manatee Wins
 
Posts: 9869
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:51 pm
Location: in context
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession -- Rolling Stone mag

Postby MinM » Mon Apr 11, 2016 9:18 am

stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Dec 09, 2015 4:37 pm wrote:
Inside the Plot to Kill JFK: The Secret Story of the CIA and What Really Happened in Dallas

The official narrative only gets more implausible, especially when you hear the stories of these secret super-spies.

By David Talbot / Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.
December 8, 2015

The following is an excerpt from the new book The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot (Harper, 2015):

Image

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Hunt drew Saint and the rest of his family deeper into his disintegrating life. Saint’s beloved mother, Dorothy—an exotic beauty with her own espionage background—would die in a plane crash in the midst of the Watergate crisis, while serving as a mysterious courier for her husband. When her United Airlines flight from Washington’s Dulles Airport crashed while landing at Chicago’s Midway Airport in December 1972, Dorothy Hunt was carrying over $2 million in cash and money orders, some of which was later traced to President Nixon’s reelection campaign...

Nixon knew that Howard Hunt had played key roles in some of America’s darkest mysteries. On June 23, 1972—while discussing the Watergate break-in with H. R. Haldeman, his devoted political deputy and White House chief of staff—Nixon was taped saying, “Hunt . . . will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things. . . . This involves these Cubans, Hunt and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”

Nixon wanted Haldeman to lean on Dick Helms, who was then CIA director, by warning him that if the spy agency did not help shut down the growing Watergate scandal, “[t]he President’s belief is that this is going to open up that whole Bay of Pigs thing . . . and it’s going to make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing . . . and we think it would be very unfortunate for the CIA and for the country at this time.”

Nixon’s ploy did not work. When Haldeman sat Helms down in his office and delivered the president’s thinly veiled threat about “the Bay of Pigs thing,” the normally icy-cool Helms exploded. “The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this!” he shouted. Nixon only succeeded in further antagonizing a very powerful Washington institution, one capable of far more deviousness than even he was.

What did Nixon mean by “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”? According to Haldeman, it was Nixon’s way of referring to the unspeakable—the Kennedy assassination. Other historians have speculated that it was shorthand for the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. In any case, “the Bay of Pigs thing” was an apt code name—it conjured all the swampy intrigue that began leaching through the Kennedy administration after Allen Dulles and his agency suffered their humiliation in Cuba, everything the CIA wanted to keep deeply hidden. And Howard Hunt was knee-deep in much of this muck...

After his family fell apart, Saint John had gone on the road as a rock musician and drug peddler, a trip that eventually deposited him in the coastal redwoods of northern California. But by the time he reunited with his father, Saint was a sober, middle-aged, law-abiding citizen who was eager to make sense of his earlier life. He was particularly interested in talking with his father about the Kennedy assassination—which he knew his father had long been linked to in conspiracy literature.

Saint’s father had always insisted that he had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death, that he was at home in Washington the day of the assassination, not in Dallas, as many JFK researchers alleged. Hunt claimed that he was shopping for ingredients at a Chinese grocery store in Washington, to cook dinner that night with his wife, when the news bulletin about Kennedy came over the car radio. But Saint, who was in the fifth grade at the time, had no memory of his father being home that day when he was let out early from school, or later that evening. And he found his father’s cover story about cooking the Chinese meal, which Hunt told under oath at a trial related to the Kennedy assassination, absurd. “I can tell you that’s the biggest load of crap in the world,” Saint John told Rolling Stone in 2007. “My dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I’m so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever.”

His mother told Saint John, around the time of the assassination, that his father had indeed been in Dallas. The mystery of his father’s whereabouts that day would prey on Saint for years. He was determined to engage his father on the subject before it was too late.

By 2003, Howard Hunt was ready to finally talk. He feared that his life was coming to an end, and he was deeply regretful that he had so little to leave his family after all they had endured. For a time, he flirted with the idea of telling all to actor Kevin Costner, who had starred in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Costner dangled a big financial reward in front of Hunt if he revealed everything he knew about Dallas, but when the money never appeared, Hunt finally dismissed the actor as a “numbskull.” Saint John nonetheless urged his father to continue down the path of full disclosure while he was still of sound mind. He made his plea in a long letter to his father, telling him that it was time to finally reveal what he knew—he “owed it,” wrote Saint, “to himself, the Nation, and his family to leave a legacy of truth instead of doubt.”

Soon afterward, Hunt phoned his son in California and summoned him to Miami. On December 7, 2003, Saint John Hunt flew to Florida—where so much of his father’s secret life had unfolded—to hear his final testament.

*

Then, after making Saint John promise he would never reveal what he was about to tell him without his permission, Hunt launched into a remarkable story of the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. It was—even at this late date in Hunt’s life—still a carefully parsed tale. He clearly was not telling everything he knew—and he seemed to be downplaying his own role in the crime as well as the complicity of former CIA superiors to whom he remained loyal. He also couched much of his narrative in an oddly speculative manner, as if he were not fully certain of the exact configuration of the plot. Nonetheless, what Hunt did tell Saint John that day was stunning enough. Over the following months, the spy elaborated on his story as his health occasionally improved. At one point, Saint brought in an expert on the Kennedy assassination and Watergate—Eric Hamburg, a Los Angeles writer-producer and a former aide to Senator John Kerry—to help videotape interviews with his father.

Laura Hunt ultimately cut short her husband’s extraordinary journey of truth telling with his son. But before Hunt died in 2007, he left behind video interviews, audiotapes, and notes in his own hand—as well as a somewhat revealing memoir called American Spy. Hunt’s confessional trove amounts to a tortured effort to reveal what he knew, while still guarding his family’s sensitivities, old professional loyalties, and whatever was left of his good name. After his father died, Saint John would make a valiant effort to get Hunt’s confessions—which should have been headline news—into the hands of the major media gatekeepers. A 60 Minutes producer spent days poring over Saint John’s rich material, but he was finally forced to apologize that the story had been spiked from above. In the end, only Rolling Stone—along with a scattering of alternative media outlets—covered the story of Howard Hunt’s astonishing final statements about the crime of the century. Saint John’s own memoir of his father’s escapades and his family’s ordeal, Bond of Secrecy, was released by a small Oregon publisher and received little promotion or attention.

This was the story that Howard Hunt left behind. Sometime in 1963, Hunt said, he was invited to a meeting at one of the CIA safe houses in Miami by Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune who had worked under Hunt in the anti-Castro underground—a man with whom Hunt would be forever linked when they were later arrested for the Watergate break-in. Also in attendance at the Miami meeting was David Morales, another CIA veteran of the anti-Castro campaign who was well known to Hunt. Morales—a big, intimidating man who had grown up in a poor Mexican American family in Phoenix—did not fit the polished CIA profile. But the agency found a use for “El Indio”—as Morales, with his strong indigenous features, was known by his colleagues.

“Dave Morales did dirty work for the agency,” according to Wayne Smith, a diplomat who worked alongside Morales in the U.S. embassy in Havana before Castro took power. “If he were in the mob, he’d be called a hit man.”

Thomas Clines, a colleague of Morales’s in the CIA’s Miami station, was more complimentary in his description, but it amounted to the same thing: “We all admired the hell out of the guy. He drank like crazy, but he was bright as hell. He could fool people into thinking he was stupid by acting stupid, but he knew about cultural things all over the world. People were afraid of him. He was big and aggressive, and he had this mystique. Stories about him permeated the agency. If the agency needed someone action-oriented, he was at the top of the list. If the U.S. government as a matter of policy needed someone or something neutralized, Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to a lot of people...”

At the secret Miami meeting, Morales told Hunt that he had been recruited for an “off-the-board” operation by Bill Harvey, with whom El Indio had worked closely on the ZR/Rifle project to kill Castro. The aim of this “off-the-board” operation, it soon became clear, was to assassinate President Kennedy. Morales and Sturgis referred to the president’s planned demise as “the big event.” ...

To Morales, Kennedy was “that no good son of a bitch motherfucker” who was responsible for the deaths of the men he had trained for the Bay of Pigs mission. “We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Morales told his attorney, Robert Walton, in 1973, after an evening of drinking loosened the CIA hit man’s tongue. It was one more confession that the media ignored, even after it was reported by one of their own, Gaeton Fonzi, a Philadelphia investigative journalist who, after going to work for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, unearthed some of the most important information related to the Kennedy case.

That old Rolling Stone piece that recounts Kevin Costner's offer of millions to E Howard Hunt in order to elicit a confession or true account of what happened in Dallas is pretty much confirmed by Talbot in his book here. There's just one problem with this story .. it doesn't make sense.

If you take E Howard Hunt at his word .. he was ready to come clean about the JFK assassination and any role he played in it. According to his son Saint John he did exactly that. So why not take Costner's money while you're at it?

Reading between the lines E Howard Hunt implies that Kevin Costner had reneged or would have reneged on their deal. Which also doesn't add up. Why was Costner willing to pay millions for the scoop on JFK one minute and then back out the next?
:ranton:

To carry on with this Costner related stream of consciousness I recall reading that Glen Ford and Gregory Peck were a couple of other actors Oliver Stone considered for the role of Jim Garrison in JFK. Those guys would have been a little on the too old to play Garrison you'd think. They both went on to live another dozen years or so after JFK (1991). So maybe it could have worked.

Since his rebellious period at the turn of the century/millennium where Costner took on the Pentagon with his 13 Days movie. Then the stuff with E Howard Hunt. Costner seems to have been brought back in line. His latest has him playing some sort of Jason Bourne type character which reunites him with JFK alums Gary Oldman and Tommy Lee Jones. His recent shilling for Israel continues too ...
ImageHaaretz.com ‏@haaretzcom Apr 9

Kevin Costner premiers new film with Gal Gadot in Israel, rejects BDS pressure http://dlvr.it/L1D123
Image

:backtotopic:
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)


Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests